by Forty years since the bitter strike of 1984-85, the threads between cricket and mining are severed but almost still bound.
A century or so ago the backbone of English cricket came from the pits. Nottinghamshire won the County Championship in 1907 with seven miners in the team and whistling down the pits for a fast bowler is no idle pride. Although you probably had to time your whistle just right, as when the young men had built up enormous strength and stamina, but hadn’t yet developed the miner’s cursed cough that came from hours crawling in the dust.
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Harold Larwood was a pit pony boy at 14 and a night shift worker at 17. Duncan Hamilton’s biography describes Larwood’s underground workplace as “hot in Dante’s hell [where] dim lights provide illumination only in intense darkness. He worked in a tunnel three feet high, chipping the coal seams and then shoveling the dirt in preparation for mining.” Larwood dreamed of the light and the sun, and it was the cricket that escaped the fate of all his close male relatives. His partner in crime for county and country, Bill Voce, was a product of the same mines at Annesley.
A large number of clubs grew up around the pits, as they did around co-operatives, churches and other industries. David Griffin, the Derbyshire CCC archivist, tells me that a lot of Saturday ship cricket started at three and continued until 8.30pm to allow the morning shift to get up and play. In August 1936, Derbyshire fielded a county-wide Championship team, 10 of whom came from a mining background.
As part of a Derbyshire Cricket Foundation project, Griffin interviewed two men from Glapwell Colliery Cricket Club about the 1984-85 strike. “Having played during that period, I think he had an impact not just on cricket but on sport in general and everyday life as well,” said one.
“I don’t remember many cases where miners who continued to work during the strike ended up on the same field as those who were on strike. They were probably so elite that they probably thought they wouldn’t put themselves through that…
“But I remember one of the Shirebrook boys telling me about Shirebrook playing one of the Notts teams, [where the miners] never came out on strike en masse. Half way through the game, some of the local lads from the village, who were not involved in the game, came up to challenge some of the Notts team…and in the end two of the lads playing for Shirebook…chased on them guys from the ground with a stump.”
There was no escape from the professional cricketers from the turmoil, with some stopped by the police on suspicion of being a flying picket – because, as the story goes, the unlikely figure of Christopher Martin-Jenkins was on his way to a commentary period. Geoff Miller talked about the unfortunate timing of his benefit season. “It was a challenge to get an advantage from Derbyshire back then. Not a lot of money has been made at the end of the day, and that’s understandable. A lot of people were out of work because of pit closures.”
Jim Beachill is chairman and president of Elsecar CC, which sits in a village between Barnsley and Rotherham. “Elsecar was the spark that sparked the strike,” he says. “Elsecar Main closed in 1983 and many of the men moved to Cortonwood, which was then to close with little notice.” After being promised five years of work, the men walked out on 5 March 1984, and the NUM called a national strike a week later.
“I was brought up in the day when everyone worked in the pit or the workshop, when you would see miners with black faces walking through the town, and you would hear the noise of the wheel taking the miners down,” he says. Bechill. “When the hole closed, everything changed. The pit kept the cricket ground together with the council but of course that also went away.
“When people are on strike, the normal things you can do, buy in the shops, you can’t do anymore. You have to beg and borrow, it was a very rough place, actually one of the few things people could do was play sport and watch village cricket.
“People from Elsecar were involved in the Battle of Orgreave. There was a feeling that the miners were a community together, the strike affected not only the miners but the children, the shops, the families, and there was a lot of determination to prevent the pits from being closed .”
When the strike was finally lost and the mines were lost, much of the cultural, sporting and musical infrastructure that accompanied it went. It was not only at Elsecar that the National Coal Board, and the miners themselves, put money into cricket clubs.
Some clubs did not manage to survive the subsequent drift out of the villages. Others, like Elsecar, have lived to tell the tale, and one of the buildings on the land which Beachill describes as “one of the most picturesque in South Yorkshire” is due to contributions from the fleet. in the 1950s.
The cricket club runs three senior and five junior teams, and the village is also resilient. Beachill describes a “thriving community, where there is a heritage center where the workshops were.
“If you ask young people, would you like a job where you won’t see the light of day in the winter, digging underground, and you could get killed – they would laugh at you. When our generation is gone, people won’t even know what a lump of coal is.” But the history of the industry is over not only in their names, but in their legacy to the old pit villages that continue to play cricket.
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